User:Sunnysideup373/Report

The following is a report reflecting on the Wikipedia project completed by myself for my COM 482 class at the University of Washington.

General Evaluation
I would say this would be a B-Class article by Wikipedia's standards. As I was digging more and more into the history behind the Battles of the Isonzo, I believe I discovered why there was so little information to begin with on the page; many of the battles are simply not extremely important. Since there are so many short, and some that are not very significant, battles, it probably would have been a better idea for the creators of the page to have made one singular page, with various headers for the different battles. It would be a rather long page, but the details would still be able to fit on the page. The more major battles could have justified their own page to avoid having too long of a main page; however, I believe that this third battle was difficult because there was not much information that was notable enough to justify the page itself.

Critique for Wikipedia and Wikimedia
Further advice on what Wikipedia could be doing: the ease of editing could be greatly changed. If not for the tutorials that I had to get through as a part of the course, then I would have been rather lost on what to do, as well as the rules that surround the Wikipedia community. It was similar to the reddit experience, especially compared to the older, less user friendly format. From the talk pages that I've seen on my classmates' articles, there are some regulations and norms that I, as an outsider to the Wikipedia community, would never have thought about. Quite frankly, I did not even know of the existence of WikiProjects, which is what I used to find the article I wanted to edit.

If Wikipedia were to make their editing formats more user friendly (or at least give talk pages visual editing), then I believe significantly more people would be encouraged to edit, or at least to make comments on pages.

Personal Experience
Quite frankly, I wish I had not played it so safe and chosen an article from a WikiProject page. I wish that I had chosen a page where more people are active on the page, to have increased the likelihood of getting feedback on the page, or at least having a user care about the changes I made to the page. It would also have been nice to have comments to go off of, rather than just my own personal observations on what changes the page would benefit from having. Having it classified as a start page did not do much. I would have liked to know what made it a start page.

In the future, I would simply pick a different, more interesting, and possibly more controversial page. If I ever have the time, I may even make a petition to remove the article I worked on as its own page, and simply put all of the information in one article along with the other battles of the Isonzo.

Additionally, I would just like to point out that the idea of barnstars had no appeal to me whatsoever. Not quite sure why, but the reddit upvote system (and in turn, reddit gold system) are more appealing. Perhaps it is because the Wikipedia community is not extremely large, or possibly because the reddit community likes to poke fun at the upvote system and the love of "fake internet points".

Norms
I mentioned earlier the "norms" of Wikipedia. To elaborate, in class we learned that norms are "rules or directives, socially acceptable or appropriate behaviors, and what members of an online community should be doing". Norms, rules, and regulations are entirely necessary in any community, whether real-world or digital. The rules of Wikipedia however, are not explicitly posted to any unsuspecting editors, which means that many people might have tried to make edits, only to find that the Wiki community had rejected all of the changes due to norms or rules that the editor was not aware of. This would be very discouraging, and it's possible that the editor would not bother trying to make the changes again. As said in class, "widespread or systematic norm violations can cause individuals to leave communities. One possible solution for ignorance of regulations may be to post the five explicit Wikipedia norms to the editing page for easy reference and as a cautionary note. In terms of community norms, the solution to that may just be finding a way to increase usage of talk pages, so that editors can be more easily aware of what previous editors have in mind for the page.

The Difference with Wikipedia
Granted, Wikipedia is much different than other online communities that I am personally much more familiar with. None of those communities were built with the main goal of education, although they do allow for sectors dedicated to knowledge and learning. Their norms are understandable, because of the importance of quality and accuracy within a Wikipedia page. Many people use Wikipedia because not only is it simple, but the information is now considered to be relatively reliable when following the regulations set by Wikipedia.